


From the Cold

by Ladycat



Series: In The Middle [1]
Category: Angel: the Series, Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Dark, M/M, Multi, Post-Chosen, Post: s05e22 Not Fade Away
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-11
Updated: 2014-02-11
Packaged: 2018-01-12 00:34:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,160
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1179800
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ladycat/pseuds/Ladycat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>On days like this one, though, Xander had an ace in his hole, a secret charm he kept locked away from the world, only his to touch and taste and love.</p>
            </blockquote>





	From the Cold

There were times, Xander thought, when everything sucked. Not just the little things—war, and death, and famine, and children with too big bellies and too old eyes looking up as if you could finally fix them. The big things, too. Like when the world used every breath and brush to remind you that inside your head, you were alone. That no matter how many friends you thought you had, no matter how much you thought they loved you, well, the didn’t. Not really.

Xander leaned back in his chair and remembered when Jonathan tried to kill himself with a high powered rifle, tucked up inside the clock tower. It had taken Buffy weeks to finally confess what words they’d shared, and the memory of it had lingered in Xander’s mind, whispering to him with every sunrise and set. _We’re all alone_ , she’d said. _We all fear and hope and worry and are afraid that it’s never as good as it’s supposed to be._

He wasn’t sure when that had become his mantra, but it was.

A girl of thirteen going on eighty looked up at him. She’d killed before, through action and inaction both, but still she had that haunted look in her eyes. The _oh god, what have I done_ and the stark realization that it can never be undone, no go backs, no restarting the game.

“It has to be done,” he told her before and now again, after, and believed it. He truly believed it, that the monsters had to be stopped so people could kill and maim and hate each other without preternatural influence. “You did a good job.”

Her smile was tremulous, but it was there.

Xander sent her on her way, instructing her to find food and rest, because for all he had become the Watcher all Watchers aspire to—when they weren’t being aristocratically condescending, anyway—he hated his job. Loathed it. He took little girls and reassured them that they were killers and did so with a smile on his face.

And every day he grew a little bit emptier. A little bit colder.

It was hard to be cold in Africa. It didn’t _get_ cold, except when it was bone-chillingly freezing. But that wasn’t cold, where you shivered and wondered if heavier clothes would help and where you could get some in the middle of a land that viewed eighty degrees as a fondly remembered dream. Xander was comfortable with the heat, by now, and understood the resulting drop into sub-zero temperatures was nature’s way of reminding that coins had two sides. That was okay.

But _cold_ , when your bones ached and your mind went numb, no one but him felt that. At least, he thought maybe that was true. According to telepathy!Buffy his thoughts were mirrored in a hundred thousand fractured pieces of glass, so maybe he wasn’t as unique as all that.

He used to want to be unique. To be different and special the way all his friends were, even Giles who wielded his knowledge the way _Read or Die_ used paper to slice people’s heads from their shoulders. He wasn’t sure when the need to be normal, one of the crowd, kicked in, but he was pretty sure it was about the same time that little girls started to look up at him as if his words to them were weighted in neon, touched with celestial grace. He wondered, sometimes, why Giles hadn’t smacked all of them so long ago.

On days like this one, though, Xander had an ace in his hole, a secret charm he kept locked away from the world, only his to touch and taste and love. It was hard to hang on to that feeling when he was out in the field, trying not to let girls kill or be killed, shatter into fragmented chunks of obsidian. But when he went home, to the tiny little hut that was echoingly empty as often as it was full, he sometimes could remember that the nuclear holocaust the reports bemoaned the start of wasn’t as dire as all that.

It helped when all three of them were home. Tripods were the strongest, weighty-iest bearing of all the designs out there, something the former construction worker knew well. It worked that way for the three of them, too. If one was gone, off hunting or finding his own demons to wrestle with, it was just _off_. They enjoyed each other individually, of course, each finding things to love and hate in their partners, regardless of the other. They each had strengths to draw upon and make their odd little home work. But there was still something missing, something not right, rocking back and forth forlornly, hanging in uncertain air, waiting for something to come and stabilize them.

Figured, that he’d be the first to arrive home that day.

Xander didn’t bother with putting things away or any of the other things he was the one to bitch about when things got too messy. That usually earned him teasing—he was the one raised by women, after all, and his nagging was proof of that. The fight that followed was always satisfying because tussling always led to sex, and sex with the three of them was good the way Xander was pretty sure sex had never been in the history of sex.

At least, in the lonely wasteland of Xander’s head, it was.

Heart heavy and aching, beating so slowly that Xander couldn’t imagine his limbs had enough energy to move, Xander climbed up to the second floor where their bedroom was. Only their bedroom—well, and a bathroom—with no other rooms to destroy the oneness that they found up there. Xander climbed into the bed, kicking off his shoes as he went, and tumbled face-down onto sheets that smelled of sweat and skin and probably needed to be changed desperately, but he wasn’t going to do it then or later. He liked that smell, what it meant, and it was almost enough to comfort him until later.

Later was better, though, when the doors banged open and voices rose up in laughter that wasn’t quite as carefree as they pretended it was. Not until Connor noticed Xander’s discarded something or other on the floor, some shift of object or disturbance in the force that only Connor could really do no matter how the others tried, informed him that they needed to get upstairs and get up there now.

When two bodies, one so hot it rivaled the cruelty of the African sun, the other as cold as barren nights, slid beside him the click of _yes, good, right there, don’t ever go_ left them all shuddering in its wake. It was always like that, every time, to the point where even Angel and Buffy had started noticing it and wincing as they waited for it to happen so the conversation or fight or whatever could continue.

“Heard about the kill.” That was Connor, his voice the highest of the three, but also the huskiest and most stable. Words didn’t bother him, perhaps why he used them so infrequently. His voice never trembled or broke, never allowed his emotions to pour through the way they did. “How bad was it?”

“Bad.” Blood dripping everywhere, as tacky as the worst horror movies and more appalling for its reality. “How’d your hunts go?”

“Got ’em.” The deep satisfaction in Connor’s voice was echoed by the cold hand that clamped over his shoulder. Xander understood personal missions, and this one resonated more deeply than most. Connor had a _goal_ , something to keep him going and usually pulled them along with him. What the hell that goal was, Xander didn’t know and never wanted to ask. He knew it meant the destruction of some fairly big-time demonic lords happily ensconced in Africa and South America—he couldn’t get the ones in Asia, yet, but he was moving towards there—and various king-making enterprises in their wake, and Xander was a-the fuck-okay with that.

“Was fun, actually. You should’ve been there.”

Spike knew what the goal was and happily—no, _enthusiastically_ —supported it. That was the other bit of reassurance Xander found he needed when Spike turned up three days after Connor did, explaining that no, Connor wasn’t a demon and Xander could untie him now, because Connor could’ve freed himself whenever he wanted and by the way, they both needed beds and food and a fuck wouldn’t go amiss because of something Xander still wasn’t sure he understood but cherished in his soul every time the words replayed themselves in his mind.

As far as the beginning of relationships go, Xander was pretty sure that was the healthiest.

“So I could watch you take out a warlord and his pet Faust, who, by the way, was the lord and master of the beasty that we killed today? Thanks, but no.” ‘We’ was always how Xander referred to himself and his girls. The girl in question shifted based on time and location, but Xander was always as deeply involved in the kills as he could be. He didn’t want to drift into faceless numbers, or allow his girls to burden themselves with their fate alone. It was what made him so good at his job.

“Aw, but it was bloody.” Spike had the most amazing hands, able to undress Xander without Xander moving or even aware of the undressing. One day he’d cop to the spell he had to be using, but until then, Xander didn’t really mind. Spike rolled him, now as naked as Connor and Spike were, onto his back and two bodies curled up against his.

It always wigged him out to remember that physically, he was the biggest. Tallest, darkest, heaviest, mostest, that was Xander. And really, when it came to the stability thing, that was Xander too, though none of them mentioned that little fact. Having two bodies, one short and surprisingly stocky without his clothes, the other so thin and wiry that his muscles looked like putty, draped over him like this always wigged him out. The heaviness of them, also surprising given how small they both were, made his chest labor and his mind fill.

Breathing immediately got easier.

“No more for a while,” Spike said eventually. Sex would happen at some point, because they were male and youngish, though their actual ages were never as set in stone as society made them pretend. Sex was good and freeing and allowed overfull minds to siphon off just enough that sleep was possible. “Think we could use a vacation.”

Xander thought about mentioning his Slayer, but didn’t. She could go home—should go home, either to her village or to England, whichever she wanted—and Spike was right. They’d been fighting and struggling for so long that Xander was damned sure that the blackness that had invaded his mind, taken him over and dragged down his soul with tungsten was just as heavy and dark in their minds. The three of them shared a synergy that always shocked others when it kicked in. It wasn’t that they felt whatever the other was feeling, no. But their thought patterns were so similar, so familiar and _right_ , that it didn’t matter which head thought it first.

“A vacation could be good.” Connor, who never sounded tired, let the weariness slip from his tongue to wrap around them the way a blanket didn’t, since it was still too hot. “One where we don’t move, right?”

“I got bootlegged movies,” Xander offered. Something was finally relaxing in his gut, shoulders untensing one string at a time until only the bed and his lovers’ weight supported him. “The third _Star Wars._ Some others Willow thought we’d enjoy. We could order in.”

Six hands moved over three chests, finding bits that throbbed regardless of whether a heart beat underneath or not. Breath glanced off his skin, sinking down into the pores until the taste and scent of it permeated his skin—and their skin. It was _right_ here. The touching was soothing, relaxing, grounding, and Xander wasn’t surprised when the heaviness around him felt lighter, the darkness not so grim. He loved these two men, and knew that they loved him in return. _Knew_ it, the way his Loki-like mind tricked him into not believing. The chill along his bones melted under cool and warm respectively, gelling until Xander could firmly tell his darkness—depression, reality, whatever name it wanted to give itself—to go fuck itself, preferably far from Xander who didn’t want to hear the noises.

“But later,” all three said at once, synergy kicking in and leaving Xander certain that no matter how echoing his skull was, there would always be people trying to push inside it. To remind him, remind _them_ that loneliness was a state of mind and the mind was always changing.


End file.
